This is the inaugural episode of the Lately in PHP podcast hosted by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert. It covers some of the latest happenings in the PHP world.

This episode covers the top active PHP user groups, interview with Guilherme Blanco of the Doctrine project, finding and posting great PHP jobs, Yahoo Hack Day event, the Yahoo Query Language, Google Developer Day event, the winners of the PHP Programming Innovation Award edition of March 2010, the article about PHP developers switching from Internet Explorer and Firefox to Google Chrome, and the plans for Firefox 4.

The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number 2 and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number 1.

This article presents a reflection about why this growth happened just in the latest years, as well what it means for the PHP world.

Sandeep Kadam, a leader of the PHP community in India gave an interview to help clarifying this subject.

As we all know, the PHP community has grown without much commercial support from companies investing large sums of money to market it. Word of mouth has always been the most powerful means of spreading news about PHP capabilities.

Unfortunately, however, PHP is not so well known and supported everywhere in the world. In regions where PHP is more popular, user groups exist which promote regular meetings and other initiatives to provide opportunities for users to build their knowledge and obtain local PHP support.